The North Face of Two World Trade Center (south tower) immediately after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175.
Wikimedia Commons/Robert on Flickr

It has been fifteen years to the day since the brutal attacks by Islamic jihadists on the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon across the river from Washington, DC, and the aborted attack  on the nation’s Capitol that ended in an aircraft crash in a deserted field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The civilian toll of dead (2,977) exceeded all the casualties suffered by U.S. armed forces and civilians (2,403) in the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor, 60 years before.

 Yet our fight to eliminate this burgeoning threat against our civilization has barely made a dent into the enemy. We have killed many of them, but they seem to have an inexhaustible supply of new recruits.

Status of the War

In fact many of our gains against the Islamists seem to have been thrown away by a President Barack Obama who seems more anxious to withdraw the U.S. from world affairs than to destroy an existential enemy. And those gains under President George W. Bush had been considerable. The armed forces under his administration had denied use of Afghanistan as a safe al-Qaeda base for training, although we were still fighting incursions of al-Qaeda from bases inside bordering Pakistan at the end of Bush’s second term and we are still fighting them now.

More controversially, Bush decided to invade Iraq and remove its President Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party from power. He and his administration had a number of motivations for this war, including removing one of the most important state sponsors of Islamic terrorism, but the only one they widely publicized was the need to remove weapons of mass destruction and their development in Iraq from the Baathists. The fact those weapons were not found led many American citizens to disillusionment about our prosecuting this war. It was probably the single biggest reason Americans elected Obama president after Bush.

After Hussein was ousted from power and executed, surviving Ba’athist officers, all Sunnis, organized the Sunni Arab resistance to the Americans in an organization called “al-Qaeda in Iraq”. This was the organization that was destined to become ISIS, or the Islamic State. While Americans still fought in Iraq, they persuaded Sunni tribal leaders to side with the U.S. in a development called the Sunni “Great Awakening” of Anbar province. The assistance of the Anbar Sunni Arab tribes, together with the surge in U.S. forces, led to the decisive defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq, at least for the time of Bush’s administration.

Ever since Obama completely withdrew the U.S. armed forces from Iraq, events went downhill for the Americans and the Iraqi opponents of the Sunni jihadists. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, unopposed by American military might or by a politically and militarily inept Baghdad government, had a “Great Re-Awakening” of their own to become the even more brutal ISIS. In the process, ISIS declared they were a world-wide caliphate to which every true Muslim owed allegiance, and began a struggle not only to expand the territory they controlled in Iraq and Syria, but to diversify and build up their control in other parts of the world. In addition to their territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has official branches in Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, the Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and  Afghanistan. Groups aspiring to become parts of the ISIS caliphate can be found in Mali, Egypt, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

It is very fortunate for us that in this war we see one Islamic jihadist power opposing another, as the Shiite nation of Iran is a fundamental enemy of the Sunni Islamic State. Below is a very clear explanation by the Council on Foreign Relations of the differences between the Sunni and the Shia and why those differences are vital to understand.

There have been many reports of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fighting in Syria, sometimes against ISIS, and sometimes against other enemies of the Assad government. Very recently they have been reported fighting against Kurdish Peshmerga, and they have also been reported engaged at Aleppo, supported by Russian airpower, against indigenous Syrian rebels opposed to the Assad regime. The Russians, at the behest of their allies the Iranians, inserted their military power into Syria to sustain the Iranian’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, in power. As it turned out, this meant sustaining him as much or more against his own rebelling citizens as against ISIS. Nevertheless, anytime ISIS and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard kill each other is  a development for the better.

Having saved Syria for Assad after seven months of combat, the Russians withdrew a large fraction of their military assets, leaving a considerable remnant. It would appear that a lot of their support for Assad went against the indigenous rebels, and far less against ISIS. In fact one of the Russian intervention’s effects, by putting air force pressure against the domestic rebels, was to generate a vast flow of Syrian refugees into Europe. Who knows how many ISIS operatives sneaked into Europe under the cloaking smokescreen of Syrian refugees? Did they assist in any way the terrorists’ assaults of which we have heard and read so much in France, Belgium, and Germany? At least one source whom I trust and respect has told me this almost certainly was a major motivation for the Russian incursion. By assisting ISIS in this very obscure manner, they were able to simultaneously put pressure on NATO, but also to appear to assist in the fight against ISIS.

The Need to Fight the Jihadists

Over time the barbarity and inhumanity of ISIS has persuaded many Americans, otherwise hostile to U.S. military involvements overseas, to support the fight against ISIS. Indeed, in a December 6, 2015 CNN/ORC poll, a majority of 53% of Americans said the U.S. should send our ground troops into a fight against ISIS. On May 5, 2016 a Pew Research Center poll was published saying that a “majority of the public (62%) continues to approve of the U.S. military campaign against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria; fewer (33%) say they disapprove. Support for U.S. military action in Iraq and Syria has held steady over the course of the past year.”

Under this kind of political pressure, Obama has been ramping up air strikes against ISIS, but one gets the impression he is doing only so much as allows him to escape general condemnation for his lack of response. If we wish to minimize our own casualties and those of our NATO friends, we will have to do a lot more than that. To go at Obama’s slow pace would mean many decades of jihadist war.

Not to war with ISIS and other jihadi groups is really not an option. The Jihadis took that decision away from us when they decided God had told them He willed war against Western Civilization until it bowed to the Muslim faith.  Certainly not all Muslims in the world agree with that interpretation, but all members of the radical jihadi groups interpret the “Verse of the Sword” in the holy Koran that way. The Verse of the Sword (Sura 9, verse 5) in the Abdullah Yusuf Ali 1934 translation of The Holy Qur’an states the following:

But when the forbidden months are past,
then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them,
and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war);
but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them:
for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.

No matter how you or any other Muslim interprets this text, the members of the radical jihadi groups interpret it to mean that they are to war against not only Western Civilization, but also against all Muslims who do not agree with them.

Is the U.S. or Western Civilization at Fault in Causing this Conflict?

Many who would like to dissuade us from waging active war against the jihadis would like to persuade us it is really Western Civilization that is fundamentally at fault in this war (See here and here and here). To be sure, if you go back far enough into time, you can find sins the West committed against Muslim civilization. But in the same way you can easily find Muslim sins against the West. For every Christian crusade a jihadi can cite, I can remember an invasion and domination of Spain, or either of the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and in 1683.

But ancient sins are just that: ancient. As time roles on, their hold on the living weakens rapidly if not reinforced by similar sins, and the last sins of this nature were the occupations by Western empires that dissolved during the 1950s. Those sins are not quite nonexistent in living memory, but the number of those living who can still personally remember those times are rapidly decreasing, especially in the third-world conditions of Iraq. Those memories are now more historical than living, and historical memory is always much weaker than living memory − except for academics and the scholarly perhaps.

Therefore, one should look for a casus belli in more recent times. One tremendous influence on a person’s mind are common beliefs and expectations endemic in that person’s culture. In Muslim cultures virtually all actions must be justified somewhere in the Quran, much as the Bible provided for earlier Christian generations. The West has fallen away to a great degree from a belief in God, causing the influence of the Bible to be much less than the influence of the Quran among Muslims. The Muslims can see this, and they can also see the much greater modern success of the West in science, medicine, economic growth, and most particularly in military technology. They must ask themselves: How can this be? Are they not more faithful to Allah, than the Christians are to God? Are they, the faithful, not the favorites of Allah? Perhaps Allah is testing them with the scourge of Western Civilization! With these kinds of thoughts, it is not surprising if some groups of Muslims might become envious of and hostile to Western Civilization.

On the other hand, why should we not think Muslim hostility was created by recent U.S. military actions, the first of which after the 1950s was the First Gulf War of 1990-1991, the U.S. incursion into Iraq ordered by George H.W. Bush to prevent Iraq from taking over Kuwait. However, that war stopped short of conquest, and the only Muslim country seriously harmed by U.S. actions was Iraq itself. The Kuwaitis certainly had reason to be grateful.

Those who claim ISIS would not have arisen at all were it not for George W. Bush’s conquest of Iraq are particularly bereft of historical memory. Among their ranks apparently is Donald Trump, who says that Bush’s conquest created the causal chain leading to the birth of ISIS and to all its destructive influences on Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Yet, all those like Trump and Ron Paul who hold this view do not understand the implications of the history preceding the second Iraq War.

They should consider the following inconvenient truths. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11/2001 preceded the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by about one-and-a-half years. The first attack on the New York World Trade Towers on February 26, 1993 preceded the invasion by about eight years. Then there were all the air hijackings by islamic extremists  in the 1980s and 1990s (see here and here and here). And of course the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983 by a group calling itself “Islamic Jihad” preceded the invasion by about a decade.  Radical Islamists, both Sunni and Shia,

have had a bulls-eye painted on Western Civilization for a lot longer than the start of the Iraq invasion by the U.S. If the United States had not invaded Iraq, the rise of ISIS almost certainly would have occurred much differently and at a different time (without the American resistance, probably earlier), but the clash of cultures made it absolutely certain that ISIS would be born one way or another, and would be seeking the death of Western Civilization.

How to Fight the Jihadists

Having no hope of evading war with the jihadist groups, like ISIS and al-Qaeda, we can only look for ways to shorten the war with the least cost in blood and treasure. And one point should be obvious: Putting forth the least effort possible will prolong the war far longer than the shortest time in which we could possibly end it.  One point on which I agree with Donald Trump is that the next president should demand a plan from his generals and admirals on how our military and naval assets could  be most expeditiously used to utterly destroy both ISIS and al-Qaeda. That plan should include how much increased spending on Defense would be needed to put us in a condition to do the job. Clearly, trade-offs, compromises, and sacrifices would have to be made because of our other big survival problem, the survival of our economy.

However, such actions by our armed forces, while absolutely necessary, are insufficient. Some have focused on the notion we can not defeat ISIS and similar jihadis by simply killing them. If we merely kill some of them, their ideas about their relations and duty to Allah have not been killed. If their ideas are not defeated, then they can spread again like an ebola virus to infect other Muslims.

There is a great deal of merit to the thought we must kill Islamic jihadist ideas. In the end ideas are the most powerful motivators for mass human action. In the end we must convince all of the Muslim world that tolerance for others and mutual respect for the rights of other cultures will gain them a lot more than a perpetual war with the rest of humanity. Yet, while we attempt to persuade all of the Muslim world about this proposition, we can not ignore the continuing need to kill members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as rapidly as we can until we achieve such a universal peace. Otherwise we might not live long enough to see the universal peace.

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